This was during an era where VHS was standard and DVD’s were just brand new at the time (before streaming sites existed). Chains like Blockbuster were booming back then with people renting movies or even TV shows for a fee but have to return them by an expected date, what happens is that in order to “keep” a copy, people would use a PC with disc burning software to burn the contents from that DVD onto a blank one.
Know those blank white DVDs? Basically those were used on storing a “pirated” disc for themselves before returning the rented copy back at the video rental store. When I was a kid, I remember encountering what clearly a pirated copy of The Prince of Egypt (so who ever pirated it kept the rented copy) since the disc art is crappy & low quality (it’s been printed then glued onto a blank DVD used for copying upon peeling it off).
During the vhs era I don’t think many had a dual tape device or a way to copy tape to tape so I think it was much more common to record from live TV than rentals. There are recreations of this on yt and elsewhere with old public domain shows and movies interlaced with commercials and trailers and stuff from the same time. DVD era I think it was a bit more popular to have a CD burner for music than DVD burner at first so people could rip DVDs easily enough with a reader but stored them on hard drives or heavily compressed on CD until DVD burners became more widely available and affordable.
The matrix came out in 1999. At that time the quality of that movie blew my mind. I remember around then you could play movies on pc with powerdvd or similar. It was a bit choppy at times but it worked.
Decss came out the same year which enabled dvd ripping. It was slow as hell back then to rip and encode a dvd. You had to use multiple tools to split the streams (audio/video) encode the audio and video separately and put them back together again. It sucked.
Divx also came out in about 1998-1999 which was a hacked up mpeg 4 codec that enabled higher quality encodes at smaller sizes.
Piracy in the 90s was more focused on audio and sneaker netting copies of stuff with your friends. The tech was just emerging to rip movies.
Dvds in the 90s were rare anyway because the players were expensive. VHS copying was much easier, as you just need two VCRs
For VHS, it was much more common to record things from broadcast. Even if someone had multiple machines, copies using standard consumer VHS degraded noticeably even in one generation.
For DVDs, writing drives were expensive and uncommon for a long time, and most early players didn’t like burned discs, so you were limited in how you could watch them anyway. I know that some people got into the mindset of physically cloning the discs, but I feel like it was at least as common to rip, re-encode just the main title with a more modern codec to shrink the size, and store that smaller copy electronically.
Nearly as prevalent, addicting, and dangerous as drugs, if public is any sort of schooling. 🤷🏼♂️
honestly wasn’t worth it. in the 90s you either had enough money to get one of those dual VHS recorders or you had two VHS players that you somehow wired up to each other to do it. you still had to pay for the blank tapes so I mean you’d rent a tape for like $3 but you’d be spending more just to have a copy of it. In many cases it was just cheaper to either record from a tv broadcast or just wait for the rental place to take the product off the shelf and sell it used.
and even when DVD-Rs came out that was still expensive. The blank discs weren’t cheap and the drive itself was expensive. Add to the fact that burned DVDs just don’t last anywhere near as long as pressed DVDs. I thought I was smart burning Dreamcast games but I’d end up having to reburn them every couple years. THEN consider the fact that many people just simply didn’t know how to burn DVDs correctly so good luck getting one to play on everyones player perfectly.
Your points are on the money for sure. I also found that Blockbuster adapted to my ability to copy a DVD pretty quickly. The whole process back then, if you only had one drive like I did, and you were copying it for a dvd player that didn’t have any of the .Avi codecs (which as someone else pointed out wasn’t very common, and it wasn’t), it took foreverrrrrrr. Like it was pretty much an hour ish long process, sometimes even a bit more in the early days, whereas if you rented a movie from blockbuster they came out with that whole “you can just keep me for an additional $4.99” or whatever it was for that movie, but it very often wasn’t all that much. So it’s like sure I’ve now spent 8 or 9 bucks on this movie I want to keep. But if I burn it, the stack of blank dvds was still 20-30 bucks back in those days, which usually broke down to about like 50 cents or whatever each, so still cheaper. But then you factored in the hour and a half of pissing around, and half the time one of the blank discs would be bad, or you’d screw a setting up or whatever, like it would take multiple discs to do it sometimes, and it just often wasn’t worth it.
That is until the dvd players that could read the .avi codecs caught up, and then .mp4 files and whatever else. Then you could usually slam a few movies on a disc if you didn’t need fancy sound. That was the period of time it became much easier to just d/l and burn. Broadband Internet was in a lot more areas by that time, like you generally had faster speeds to d/l and the burners were burning by then at like 24x or even sometimes ~48x if I remember right. And you could have almost weeks worth of movies on a single dvd, if you were a one movie every few days kinda guy like i was.
You could use one of the extended records and have multiple movies on one tape. Very common.
We were friends with a family that had a satellite dish (think like a huge ass monstrosity that was almost as big as the house out in the backyard, not those direct TV small ones on the side of a house that came much later). They had the US movie channels, so they would plow I think it was generally about 3 movies on a tape, and then you’d just take that tape home and we had a couple vcrs at this point, and you’d just rca cable them together, one played and one recorded. And you were the king of the neighbourhood, because you often had movies well before the rental store had them, they’d often still be in theatres.
Those were the days. I had a 12 foot paraclypse c-band satellite dish. That thing would pick up everything.
I still have a ton of CDs and DVDs I burned in mid 2000s. I’m pretty sure they all still work.
It’s like VCRs now though, in that I don’t think I have an actual player or a disk drive in any of my computers anymore. I think some of them would work in my PlayStation, but I also have Spotify and IPTV, so in the time it took me to write this comment, I’d have it called up.
For the record though, I know for a fact they still largely work. I did verify that a few years ago, when my wife tried to throw them out.
Not common enough
I remember most people had more copies than real. But ironically the people wiyh the biggest collections would often buy the offical releases.
It was not free. You rented for a price, then returned the VHS. The longer you kept it, the more you paid.
My grandma recorded a few thousands of VHS, but she aimed at an historical collection so that was all from the television, dubbing existing VHS needed more equipment and was. Not that easy.
We had a VHS camcorder that didn’t have the anti copy channel on its play head. So you could record commercial VHS with the scrambl copy protection right to any connected VCR. I think at even had S-video for higher quality, but I may be wrong. It’s still in my moms attic because I wouldn’t let her throw it away 7-8 years ago.
But also during the Netflix DVD era I ripped 100s of movies and tv series.
The drives are all dead by now though because burning them to DVD took too long.
My dad had us on the VCR train pretty early on, so we had a model that was from 83 or 84, like whenever they basically first came out for home use. All those scrambl and antipiracy protections they had later on, it wouldn’t pick them up. So if I remember this correctly, as long as you used the older VCR to play the movie, you could copy it on the newer one, and those protections wouldn’t work and it would come out just fine. I even remember, quite vividly, when we discovered that. One of those key moments in our household.
Same. Our camcorder was one of the first that didn’t need to have a separate deck slung over your shoulder. But our VCR (early RCA) still separated so you could use it with a camera.
I think we got it in 84-85 too. I think our basement tv was still black and white at that point. We only ever used it during tornado warnings.
That was Macrovision, which was a signal inserted into the top few frames that weren’t shown on a TV, but which the VCR used to calibrate its black level. I designed a box which removed them so I could make copies of stuff. It was a bit pointless with hindsight, because I very rarely watched the copies I made. I think the enjoyment of getting one over on the man was far more than actually watching the films.
I wasn’t even trying to copy, just trying to connect a DVD player to my RF-cable-jack-only TV.
DVD player -> AV cables -> VCR -> coaxial cable -> TV.
Nope! Not allowed! It’s 2001 and we’re already screaming loud and clear that pirate copies are superior because they just work.
I ended up getting a Voodoo3 3500 TV on clearance sale, and playing movies on the TV through that.
It was definitely a wildly practiced sport for sure. If you had kids like we all were, those tapes got used. But for the adults, yeah it was basically just for sport.
Thank you! I’d forgotten the term. It’s been a solid 30 years since AV class.
staying at my friends relatives house for the weekend was pretty awesome because they had a “black box” cable hookup and you heard about it but rarely saw it.
in fact thats how i saw bash at the beach 96.
The ol de-srambler. Those were def pretty rare (in my area anyways) I think I only ever actually saw one of them in the wild. We live pretty close to the US border where I’m from, so everyone in my area missed the descrambler phase, but were pretty captivated in that whole DirecTV copy the card and unlock all the channels for free era. My buddy even had the card copier thing and everything, like you’d get whacked and he’d just nonchalantly would stroll back across the street and burn you a new card, and you’d be back up in like 5 or 6 minutes.
The ol era where you figured out like gee I’ve got 600 channels here, but I still cant find anything on that I want to watch lol.
It was surprisingly common, though due to the cost of buying tapes, it wasnt as common as it is now.
VHS tapes have this nifty feature where you could store video on it in 3 different formats. While the tape from the rental place was stored in the format that fit roughly 2hrs on a tape, you could record three 2hr movies to a tape if you used the lower quality EP format (I think that was the acronym).
This lead to people like my friend’s dad keeping shelves of tapes with hastily scrawled labels on them for 3 different movies or 6 different episodes.
All you needed for any of this was 2 VCRs, which from the early 90s were pretty affordable.
Yep! I saw and rewatched tons of movies this way as a kid. We had two VCRs and my stepdad copied most of what we watched for a handful of years, but I can’t remember when exactly it started. We had Road House on a copied tape, so it was likely in the early 90s.
He also had some copied Betamax tapes from the 80s too, so he was a pretty early adopter of piracy. I first saw Labyrinth on Betamax!
I can’t speak for others but for myself basically zero.
Because the rental cost of non new releases was so low it hardly made sense for movies I would only watch once or twice a year. In addition due to the frequent replaying on cable of many movies that would further reduce my need to pirate.
Piracy for me has almost always been a service or availability problem.
some had copy protection but some vcr’s would ignore it so you could copy it anyways. but often the tapes from the rental store were poor quality, so copying it would make no sense, even for effectively “free” (remember you needed two vcr’s to do this, not a common thing at all at the time)
Yeah I’d rent things and copy. But blank VHS tapes or DVD-R discs were definitely not free.
With VHS, you had to own two VHS players, one to play and one to record and they were kind of semi luxury items, at least early on, and analog copying significantly reduced quality so it often wasn’t worth it.
With DVD, one DVD player can be just a player and one a read/writer. And writers and discs were very expensive and until later, the discs were write once. So, of it fails part way, you waste a disc. Also, the encryption on DVDs was an issue for a while, but the key was cracked and eventually software became common. Though the DMCA made it illegal to bypass the encryption with pretty significant penalties even for a single one whereas VHS there were just laws relayed to copying that have less possible penalties than bypassing encryption, despite those FBI warnings.
But, yeah, every time I rented something I liked I would try to copy it when I had the hardware to do it. And when Netflix started, I copied a lot of those DVDs before returning them.
Well, it would’ve been a lot harder for one; you would’ve needed two VCRs and an external TBC between the two decks to bypass Macrovision on pre-recorded tapes.
You also would’ve needed to fast-forward past the ads on the pre-recorded tape on deck A, and start deck B recording a few seconds before deck A, so your pirated tape would have a few seconds of dead air before the content starts.
Also, when you make a copy of a copy of an analog format, your pirated copy would be degraded vs. the original, so you’d inevitably have a lower-quality copy as a result.
Basically, VHS piracy was definitely a thing, but A) it would’ve been harder than just ripping a DVD and B) you’d have a worse copy due to the generational degradation of analog formats, and that generational degradation would’ve been compounded onto what would’ve surely been a well-worn pre-recorded tape if it was a rental.
I had thought quite common. I know I was at every step of the way. Started with vhs way back in the day. I was just a kid, probably 10 or 11. Dad used to bring home pirated bootleg bloopers a mate had given him, or something. But I just figured out how to do it, at every stage for myself, because I loved rewatching my favourite movies over and over. I didn’t think it was ever hard, or expensive. I just asked the guys at the local electronics store, if I got stuck. They helped me figure out how to bypass the copywrite protection on vhs tapes.
